Europe and Web2.0

Another post from me – you may have guessed today (a Bank Holiday in England) that I am catching up on some of my reading. Anyway, I have just been reading this post/presentation from Nicole Simon, a European New Media Specialist. It is a copy of a presentation on a European Perspective on Web2.0 at the Web2open during the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Any European based person will recognise a lot of the annoyances that Nicole highlights.

very often “we” get rejected – based on the fact that we are not US citizens or we do not live in the states. When companies, especially in the US, build their services they forget about the market which is outside of the US as in “we do not care”.

She reminds these companies that if second language is taken into account over 50% of the population of Europe speak/understand English; that the EU’s ecomony is the largest in the world.

I really liked was the date moan … and agreed … yes American people we do day/month/year … 9/11 for us means the 9th of November and also the ‘downtime’ moan … depending on time zones these handy things can occur in the middle of the day for those of us in Europe.

It would be so easy to reall go into rant mode – in agreement – reading this, but, I’ll resist.